Our Vision For Community-Based Tourism

Genuine community-based tourism empowers communities to discover elements of their cultures and lifestyle that are valuable to share with guests. These can be ways of life which local people have long taken for granted as uninteresting or inferior, for example the languages spoken, the food eaten, the homes lived in or the way a sense of neighbourliness is built.

These are the gems that more and more responsible and adventurous tourists around the world are seeking to encounter in their travels. And the precious memories of these authentic interactions with a home community remain with travellers far longer than the memory of a museum visited or an animal seen. In fact, these experiences often become very meaningful and life-changing, precisely because they are mutual exchanges where the person visiting and the person being visited can truly connect and learn from and with one another.

In contrast, conventional tourism often provides a more limited view of a country; a perspective that hotels, game parks, cultural villages and tour guides “design” to “present” to tourists. This can easily become a contrived view of the country that keeps the visitor and the visited separate.

A GENUINE TWO-WAY EXCHANGE OF MINDS AND HEARTS

For Phaphama, genuine community-based tourism means that local people are central to it, taking responsibility and benefitting from all aspects of the visit; setting it up, carrying it out, ensuring the safety and comfort of the guest and even following up with the traveller who has now become a friend. And in the process of generating income, communities that have traditionally been marginalized regain a sense of dignity and pride, while visitors go home with a new enriched way of looking at life.

In our full- or half-day tours you will get to meet and talk with local people. You will share a meal with them, prepared and hosted by the families in the neighbourhood. And you will be able to hear from the perspective of local people what life is like in a country that has come through a remarkable transition, and that still has immense human development challenges.

Your tour guide will facilitate this meeting so that it caters to your area of interest and becomes a genuine two-way exchange of minds and hearts. In the process, you will learn a few words of an African language and receive an African name, which you can use throughout your stay in our country to help you integrate with South Africans.

Phaphama’s community tourism is relationship-tourism at its most authentic; one that will answer some of the questions you have long had about South Africa, and one that will raise many more questions for you to grapple with as you return home.

HOW PHAPHAMA BECAME INVOLVED IN “TOURISM”

Phaphama Initiatives conducts Africa language courses, known as TALK courses. In a TALK course, every language learner is paired up with a mother-tongue speaker of the target language. Also, as part of this training, every group of learners spends one day visiting the home of one of their language helpers, usually in Soweto. The trip to the helper’s home is always in an ordinary taxi. During this day, learners practise the language they have learnt by walking in the streets and talking to the community, they buy food from the hawkers and cook an African meal, which they then enjoy together. They sing, dance, play language games and share in culture discussions with one another.

Participants in a recent Phaphama workshop

Over the years, the request for these “mini-immersions” spread to other people, even those who were not enrolled on a TALK African language course. Today, TALK Tourism is a thriving initiative that combines Phaphama’s other work to enrich visitors’ experiences in South Africa. During the World Cup in June 2010, Phaphama hosted overseas and local soccer fans in a very successful tourism initiative: so successful that the Minister for Tourism, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, appointed Phaphama as one destination in his Sho’t Left Roadshow of Soweto in August 2010.

RECENT PARTICIPANTS

TALK has arranged meaningful, personal, cross-cultural encounters for South Africans and visitors from abroad from the following sectors:

The anti-apartheid movement in the U.S.A. and the Netherlands

Religious groups from Riverside Church, New York

Students from Michigan State University, the University of Delaware and the Eastern Mennonite University, among others

Dutch, British, French, Italian, German, Chinese, American and other visitors

Review of TALK Tourism Immersion Visit by a student at Delaware University, USA

“This was an unbelievable experience. One that truly shows what life in South Africa for the average person is like. The son of the family I stayed with showed me a night life in Soweto that I could not have experienced on my own. Everyone was so friendly that I never felt so comfortable being the only white person. There was no difference in colour – we were all the same”.

Review of TALK Tours in the Lonely Planet Guide to South Africa

"TALK arranges 'immersion visits' where you spend time living in a community while learning the language (or just experiencing the culture - it's up to you). This can be anything from a weekend in Soweto to a month or longer in KwaZulu-Natal. TALK can organise just about anything for small groups, including meals with African families and visits to townships, with the emphasis on people-to-people contact.
VISITING SOWETO : If you're interested in something along the lines of cultural immersion rather than sightseeing contact the TALK project for details of its Soweto homestay and tour programs."

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Review of TALK Tourism by a recent visitor

"The people from Phaphama were just amazing. They basically bent over backwards for me. I have an interest in choral music : they organized an evening at a choir practice for me. I talked about visiting a school : they made it possible for me to spend a day in an elementary school. I mentioned wanting to see the Apartheid Museum and Constitution Hill in Johannesburg : they found a way to get me there. At the end of my stay, I had to go and meet my tour group at the other end of town and was unsure how to get there: they did much more than help me find my way, they actually took me there!
I have had the opportunity to experience homestays in several other countries, organized by different organisms, but this one beats them all! My 3 days in Soweto were the highlight of my trip. I feel that I have had a glimpse into "real" South African life. If I could, I would do it all over again, and if I ever go back, it will be for an extended rural homestay organized through Phaphama."